GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS IN NORTHERN AFRICA

There is a crying need for a book like this; Africa south of the Sahara and the Middle East have both been the source of numerous recent political investigations, while somehow the eight states--Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia--which in geographical, cultural, and so many other ways are both African and Near Eastern at once, have been largely overlooked by serious scholarship. Believing that the usual terminology ""of colonialism and independence, of dictatorship and democracy, do not provide adequate perspectives for judging this area,"" Mr. Zartman has provided a terse modern political history of each nation, together with an opening and concluding chapter intended to clarify over-all tendencies and common sources of difficulty and misunderstanding. The objection might be made that it is too terse; the social, economic, and legislative complexes of eight neighboring but radically different countries add up to an enormous amount of necessary information to be squeezed into 224 pages; and the unfamiliar, unadorned names of hundreds of public figures and organizations cannot possibly be kept separated according to purpose and place: but, as a handy reference if not a definitive text, this work has a unique and timely value.